Jessica Cisneros has been hitting the road. For months now, the Democratic congressional hopeful has been campaigning every single day, meeting with voters in every corner of Texas’s 28th District: canvassing in the Rio Grande Valley; rallying with striking symphony workers; marching with the AFL-CIO in San Antonio; and stopping by a menudo cook-off in Laredo.
Cisneros is a new type of candidate for South Texas: She’s only 28 years old, and her campaign events are attended by throngs of young volunteers and the older relatives they've brought along. Her politics represent a shift too: Cisneros supports Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, and a more inclusive immigration policy.
“I think, especially in this area, there’s this misconception that politics is only for a certain kind of person,” Cisneros tells Teen Vogue. She thinks it’s time for a shake-up and that she’s the kind of politician South Texas needs: someone who can bring much-needed change to both Congress and the state’s 28th District, which has been represented by Henry Cuellar since 2005.
This primary is one of most closely watched races in one of most closely watched states in the country during a midterms cycle that is expected to go poorly for the Democratic Party. Texas Republicans have positioned themselves at the vanguard of movements that target trans kids and their families, ban abortion, and severely restrict what students can be taught in schools about race, gender, and sexuality — making the election to Congress of a young, forward-thinking Tejana all the more meaningful at this moment.
Cisneros’s opponent, Cuellar, is one of the most conservative Democrats in the House. He’s the only remaining House Dem who opposes abortion, recently voted against the legalization of marijuana, and has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the fossil fuel and health care industries. He’s also been swept up in an ongoing FBI investigation, and he happens to be Cisneros’s former boss.
In 2014, when Cisneros was 20 years old, she left Texas to intern on Capitol Hill. She was a law student at the University of Texas at Austin and had recently gotten involved in immigrant rights work. A few years earlier, the Obama administration had implemented Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA — a program that shielded some young, undocumented people from deportation — and it seemed like comprehensive immigration reform was right around the corner, Cisneros recalls. “I wanted to have a front-row seat,” she says. “I thought, What better place than to go intern for my congressman, so I can help people back home?”
The internship wasn’t quite what Cisneros expected. Congress didn’t pass an immigration reform bill, and since then the parties have grown far more polarized on the issue. Cisneros was “very much disappointed” with Cuellar’s politics: “A lot of the people he took meetings with weren’t people like me and my parents here at home, but lobbyists.”
But there was one bright spot: Cuellar's office, like those of most members of Congress, was run by people in their 20s and 30s. “Young people,” Cisneros says, “run our government."
That’s why she ran against Cuellar — whom she’s referred to as “Trump’s favorite Democrat” — in the 2020 Democratic primary. She lost by four percentage points, a remarkably close margin given Cuellar’s incumbency and the fact that he reportedly outspent her by $700,000.
This time, the race is even closer. Cuellar and Cisneros faced off in a March primary: He got 48.4% of the vote, she got 46.9; a third candidate got 4.7. Since nobody managed to hit the 50%-plus-one threshold required to declare outright victory, voters in Texas’s 28th District will choose between Cuellar and Cisneros one more time, in a runoff election on May 24.
Cisneros attributes the close race to the organizing infrastructure her campaign built during the previous election cycle. “I think the biggest difference this time around was the fact that, from day one, we hit the ground running,” she says.
Cisneros spoke to Teen Vogue from her campaign office on a recent Tuesday evening, after a long day jam-packed with staff meetings and other interviews. Behind her were four posters: a simple campaign ad with her face on it; a picture of a jaguar with “juntos” (together) written above its head; a rainbow flag made of triangles; and “la salud reproductiva es un derecho” (reproductive health is a right) emblazoned over an orange floral background.
Her campaign has an army of volunteers who already knew how to canvas and phone bank; Cisneros has name recognition. She also has endorsements from some of the most prominent progressive politicians in the country, including Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Elizabeth Warren, as well as from organizations such as EMILY’s List, the United Farm Workers, and the Sunrise Movement.
Some have framed this heated race as a national referendum on whether Democrats — and Latinos, in particular — actually support progressive issues. Republicans doubled their turnout in Webb County, of which Laredo is the county seat, in 2020. The shift was largely driven by Latino voters, who make up the majority of the population in South Texas. Cuellar has tried to use Cisneros’s endorsements and policies to paint her as being out of touch with the values of the district. One campaign ad accused her of wanting to “defund the police and Border Patrol, which would wreck our local economy.”
But Cisneros suggests it is Cuellar who’s out of touch with the people of the district. “The values of my campaign and the values of this district are hard work and familia,” she says. “We’re not just supporting progressive policy because it’s progressive. We’re supporting it because we truly believe that’s what speaks to the issues that hardworking South Texas families are facing.”
“When we're talking about any kind of issue, whether it be reproductive rights, whether it be trans rights, or worker's rights," Cisneros continues, "it's always based around the notion [that] we have to do right by our South Texas families, and we have to make sure that we are providing the best opportunity that we can so families can prosper and thrive here in our district."
An immigration lawyer and daughter of Mexican immigrants, Cisneros is the only member of her family born in the United States. Her parents moved to Texas before she was born to get medical care for her older sister. And when Cisneros was a teenager, she and her family had to find creative ways to also pay for her aunt's health care costs. "I remember being 13 years old and having to fundraise — to sell plates of food on the side of the highway with my family, because we were trying to figure out how we’re going to pay for these medical expenses,” she says.
Cisneros’s progressive stances will only help if her campaign talks to voters about the issues, says Stephanie Valencia, cofounder of the Latino-focused research firm EquisLabs. “I don’t think Latinos are looking at who’s progressive and who’s not.” Instead, she says, they’re asking questions like, “Who’s going to fight for me? Who’s going to make my life better? Who’s going to bring down prices? Who do I trust to take care of me and my family?”
Cisneros’s campaign has hammered Cuellar for his voting record and over the recent FBI raid of his home and campaign headquarters. In January, ABC News reported that the agents’ visits were part of a sprawling federal investigation into the dealings several U.S. businessmen had in Azerbaijan, and that they were searching for records related to the congressman, his wife, and “at least one of his campaign staffers.” (Cuellar has said he is fully cooperating with the investigation, which he says “will show that there was no wrongdoing on my part.” Cuellar’s attorney recently told reporters that the congressman is not the target of the investigation.) While Cisneros maintains that the probe is indicative of her opponent’s “potential public corruption,” when speaking to voters, her small army of canvassers and phone bankers tends to focus more on kitchen-table issues.
Paris Moran, a digital director with the Sunrise Movement who canvassed for Cisneros, says she didn’t encounter many conservative voters when knocking on doors. “It really came down to the issues, and that’s why we were really happy to have been on the ground to do that type of persuasion turnout,” Moran explains. Voters were most concerned about jobs and reproductive rights, she says — and, after the FBI raids, they increasingly asked about corruption.
Fifteen organizers from Sunrise canvassed across the state for both Cisneros and Greg Casar, another Texas progressive running for Congress, who easily won his March primary race and is all but guaranteed to win his seat. The organization says it also made more than 400,000 voter outreach calls in the weeks leading up to the March primary.
“You could tell people hadn’t been talked to by their representative in a while,” says Moran, who is from San Antonio. “Some didn’t even know [Cuellar’s] name, or that the race was happening.”
This type of outreach has also been useful for clearing up what Moran and other organizers describe as misconceptions about Cisneros’s policies, such as her support for the Green New Deal. Cuellar and his staffers have called the Green New Deal a “failed policy” and claimed that Cisneros’s climate stance would cause thousands of oil and gas workers to lose their jobs. Moran says that part of the organizers’ job is to have conversations with voters about the issues, including the Green New Deal.
Ultimately, the 28th District primary is about the old guard vs. the new. The question is whether voters want more of the same or are they interested in change. “I think people are used to the same old, same old,” says Yvonne Gutierrez, the managing director of the Latino Victory Project, which endorsed Cisneros. “'This is the family that we support, this is the family that runs for office, this is the man that’s been there for however many years and we all just vote for them.'”
Gutierrez praises Cisneros’s voter outreach efforts and says they will likely help persuade voters. Incumbents, she notes, “don’t feel like they have to organize or communicate with constituents on a regular basis, because it’s in the bag.”
Cuellar has said that Cisneros, as a newcomer to Congress, would lack the seniority needed to get things done. The incumbent serves on the powerful Appropriations Committee, and has said his relationships have helped bring millions of dollars in federal funds to South Texas. Citing Laredo’s high poverty rate, Cisneros countered that those funds have done little to improve the lives of everyday people.
“People still have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet; that hasn’t changed,” Cisneros says. “If he really is quite as powerful as he says, we probably would have had solutions a long time ago, but things haven’t changed for us here in South Texas.”
Politics Director: Allegra Kirkland
Photographer: Sarah Karlan
Hair and Makeup Artist: Lindsey Hendrix
Art Director: Emily Zirimis
Designer: Liz Coulbourn
